KINDER'S COMMENTARY: VETO SESSION, REFORM AND ENGLISH

This week finds those of us in the Missouri General Assembly back in Jefferson City for the annual veto session, a constitutionally mandated period during which we consider those items vetoed by the governor. Most of the air went out of the balloon for this year's session when Sen. John Schneider, D-St. Louis, announced he wasn't going to bring up his abortion caregiver bill (Senate Bill 279) for an override attempt.

Together with other pro-life lawmakers, I was ready to vote to override Gov. Mel Carnahan's veto of this moderate and reasonable measure. My mail has been running overwhelmingly in favor of a vote to override, and now, because of a deal between a governor and the bill's sponsor, that opportunity has gone a glimmering. This deal was nicely executed to protect a governor and legislative majority who didn't want to have to go on the line on a tough issue. The pro-life voters of Missouri -- a majority in election after election -- shouldn't forget this nicely executed dodge when next year's elections come around.

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The news on those who call themselves "reformers" of public education and their attempts to address our society's needs continues to interest me. This brief item from the largest circulation newspaper in America was one I found provocative.

"American Jobs

"In case they missed it, we recommend all the presidential candidates get last Friday's (Sept. 8) front page story in the Journal by Raju Narisetti on why many U.S. manufacturing jobs are going unfilled. While the hot air fills with rhetoric about immigrants or foreign nations 'stealing' U.S. jobs and the like, many companies such as Lincoln Electric in Ohio have to reject upward of 20,000 job applicants because they can't do high school algebra. That is, the good jobs exist, but young people qualified to perform them don't exist. It's time for our politicians to stop romanticizing the American worker and start doing something about the fact that our high school diplomas have so little relevance to the modern workplace."

-- Wall Street Journal, "Notes and Asides", Sept. 11, 1995.

Reading that blunt editorial challenge this past Monday morning got me to searching for the article that I, too, had missed. It is an incredible story. An outstanding company that has never laid off a worker in its 100-year history, simply can't find well-trained, qualified workers to fill the jobs they have for the taking.

Incidentally, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress released this summer, 74 percent of our fourth graders aren't reading at their own grade level. I'd say that is an educational catastrophe in the making that has potentially dire consequences for our competitiveness in international markets.

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Writing in the Washington Post, Lally Weymouth had some interesting things to say about Sen. Bob Dole's recent endorsement of Rep. Bill Emerson's bill to make English the official language of the United States. Weymouth wrote that in endorsing the Emerson bill, Dole "speaks for most Americans ... and for good reason. America's successes and prosperity have always turned on the determination of immigrants to assimilate into a common culture with common values and, yes, a common language." The concept of assimilation, Weymouth continues, "has never meant the abandonment of ethnic, religious or even racial identity." Still, a national policy that doesn't focus on "the long-term success of the melting pot concept virtually dooms America as a civilization," Weymouth concluded.

Bill Emerson is gaining co-sponsors (about 160 House members, at latest count) and is earning increasingly frequent, and increasingly favorable mentions in the national press. Bill Buckley, columnist, author and patron of conservatives everywhere, is the most recent to have written favorably of Emerson's bill.

I have introduced similar legislation on the state level in Missouri and will be back for another effort in the session that begins in January.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.